1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a medical workstation for treating a patient.
2. Description of the Prior Art
German OS 197 14 984, for example, discloses a medical workstation in the form of a surgical-operative workstation. The workstation has an integrated device and operating unit that with a common housing in or at which a number of devices or device components, a central control unit, a central operating unit, etc., are accommodated or arranged. The operating unit can also contain a unit for voice control. The integrated device and operating unit, provides working and moving space for personnel working at the workstation and, for example, treating a patient.
After a treatment of a patient in the form of an examination, therapy administration or an operation, the attending physician usually produces a physician""s report which documents the examination results, the therapy progress, or the course of the operation. This physician""s report is added to the patient""s file and is thus available for further physicians given renewed treatments of the patient.
Producing such a physician""s report current ensues only after the examination, therapy administration or the surgical intervention. A disadvantage is that a time span of several hours or even days can intervene between the treatment of the patient and the preparation of the physician""s report due to a heavy workload of the physician. This results in a risk that the information relating to the treatment, particularly in stress situations, could slip from the physician""s memory, and thus would not be added to the file, possibly to the detriment of the patient. A further disadvantage of this procedure is that the physician must again expend time after a treatment of a patient in order to recapitulate the medical event and prepare the physician""s report.
German OS 43 31 710 discloses a general purpose apparatus with means for dictation, means for transmission of the spoken voice signals and with a reception means that preferably comprises a voice recognition means. The apparatus serves the purpose of producing and commenting on text documents as well as for sending and receiving text documents via a telecommunication means.
An object of the present invention is to provide a medical workstation of the type initially described wherein the physician can already prepare at least a draft of the physician""s report during the treatment of a patient.
This object is inventively achieved in a medical workstation for treating a patient allowing for registering information during the treatment of the patient by a device for electrical registration of voice signals, device for continuously storing the registered voice signals, and a communication path for the transmission of the registered voice signals from the device for registration to the storage device. With the invention, a physician can already document the course of the treatment or prepare a physician""s report during the treatment of a patient, quasi online, by speaking appropriate information into the device for electrical registration of voice signals, for example into a microphone. The device for registering voice signals is connected via the transmission path to the device for the continuously storing of the registered voice signals. The storage of the voice signals can ensue electronically in the form of an analog or digital storage of the voice signals or in the form of storage of the voice signals on paper by printing out the voice signals after they are registered. A physician""s report spoken during a treatment of a patient and registered is thus either present on paper or, preferably, electronically stored and can be unproblemmatically further-processed, i.e. acoustically and/or visually reproduced, amended, corrected or printed out and added to a patient file. An advantage of the inventive apparatus is thus that the time that the physician must expend for preparing physician""s reports is clearly reduced by the possibility of online documentation during a treatment since the apparatus function quasi parallel in time with the treatment, i.e., the physical, simultaneously performs a diagnosis and registers the results or conclusions. Moreover, differing from the conventional practice, namely being compelled to produce physician""s reports only after a treatment, the immediate preparation of physician""s reports during a treatment prevents information relating to the treatment from being unintentionally lost, particularly in stressful situations of the appertaining physician, and thus possibly not being reflected in a physician""s report to the detriment of the patient.
In one version of the invention the device for electrical registration of the voice signals is arranged so as to be carried by a person substantially in the region of the mouth of the person. Such an attachment of the device for registration of the voice signals has the advantage that the sound level of the registered ambient noises is significantly lower than, for example, the words of a physician spoken and registered during the treatment, so that a clear distinction is possible between the ambient noises and the spoken words of the physician.
In another embodiment of the invention the transmission path for the voice signals is formed by an electrical connecting line. The employment of a connecting line for the transmission of the voice signals between the device for registration and the storage device offers the advantages of being economical and not being especially susceptible to noise signals that could cause transmission errors.
In a further embodiment of the invention the transmission path for the voice signals employs wireless transmission from a transmission unit allocated to the device for registering the voice signals and a reception unit allocated to the storage device. The employment of wireless transmission and reception units for signal transmission offers the advantage that is very comfortable for the user since no connecting cable, that could possibly disturb the attending physician, is present. The wireless transmission of the voice signals can ensue, for example, with infrared light or electromagnetic radio waves.
In another version of the invention, the device for continuously storing the voice signals is a pickup unit provided with a storage medium, so that the voice signals stored on the storage medium can be acoustically reproduced. For example, the pickup unit can be a cassette tape recorder and the storage medium can be a tape cassette. After a treatment of a patient during which, for example, a physician has recorded the cassette, this cassette can be given to a typist for transcribing the physician""s report stored on the cassette, so that the physician need not expend any further time for the recapitulation of the course of the treatment and the subsequent production of the physician""s report. The physician""s report written by the typist merely has to be reviewed by the physician, with little time expenditure, corrected as needed, and, finally, signed. The pickup unit can also be a computer that, for example, contains a circuit board of the type known comprises what is referred to as a sound card for the registration and playback of acoustic signals and a memory, for example a hard disk or magnetic drives provided with storage media etc. In this case, the voice signals can be digitally stored on one of the storage media and, for example, can be acoustically reproduced with the sound card and speakers of the computer.
In a preferred embodiment of the invention the device for continuously storing of the voice signals has a speech recognition system allocated thereto. Such a speech recognition system can, for example, be a computer equipped with appropriate hardware, for example, a sound card, and operated with a suitable software. The speech recognition system functions such that, for example, the voice signals spoken by a physician during the treatment are converted into a text file after the transmission to the speech recognition system, for example a data file in the known Word format of Microsoft, i.e. a written physician""s report, and are stored. This can be subsequently presented to the physician, corrected as needed by the physician and ultimately signed by the physician, so that it can be added to the patient""s file. The storage of the voice signals in a data file also offers the advantage that the data file can be added to a data bank containing patient data, for example in a hospital information archiving system, and the data of the data file can be combined with data of the patient, for example registered image data, physiological or personal data of the patient, that are stored in other data files in the data bank, i.e. new data files can be produced using the various patient data for physician""s reports.